Heroes

Chapter 14. Found Nate

The others looked at me like I was demented.
"Mark..." Morgan began, but I stopped her.
"What?"
"We understand that you want to find Nate, but we could escape right now. We don't need anyone else."
"I'm not leaving him here. He doesn't deserve to be left here. Noone does." I saw that they were taking in my words and, although they didn't seem super on board, they knew I wasn't changing my mind.
"Fine. What do we do first?" Jack asked me. I thought about it for a few moments and then said, "We need to get to the main hallway."
"That's just outside," Steph told me, trying to be helpful. I rolled my eyes.
"I meant, the hallway above."
Morgan, Mat and Steph gave each other a worried glance, but nodded convincingly enough at me.
"Cool. Everyone follow my lead."

The main floor of the building was quiet. Almost too quiet. There didn't seem to be any guards around, which I guess was good. We slowly started down the hallway, not sure where we were going but just walking there anyway. We had only moved about 10 feet when I heard a shrill scream behind me. Turning my head, I saw one of the inmates staring at us. Not an inmate like us, just a normal inmate. I guess it's weird to call an insane asylum patient normal. Anyway, she was watching us incredibly closely. She was the first to break the ice.
"Are you from below?" She had a voice that matched her scream: high pitched and loud.
"Um, yes, we are. And would you mind not being so loud? We don't want people to know we're here," Jack said.
"Oh, I get it," she said, not lowering her voice even a little. "You're not supposed to be up here. Well, if that's the case, maybe I should call someone. They'd want to know if the most dangerous patients had got out, wouldn't they?"
She was taunting us. Looking at my friends, we were all thinking the same thing: We all wanted to use our powers on her, but we didn't want to risk someone walking in and seeing us. So instead, we did nothing. And I mean, nothing. We stopped breathing so our chests wouldn't rise and we stayed as still as possible. We'd heard about how to survive if there's a T-Rex near you, and this was basically the same thing. She could call someone at any moment, and our entire plan would be foiled. All because of Nate. God, why did he have to do this? He could've just stayed in the room, but no, he had to leave and cause us to go looking for him.
I was having this whole conversation with myself in my head. The inmate hadn't come any closer to us, but she was scrutinising us, checking for any signs of movement. When she didn't see any, she sauntered off, swinging her arms wildly.
"Thank God she left," Morgan muttered, breathing deeply.
"Mark? What's wrong? You look pissed," Mat asked. I realised that I had clenched my hands into fists and was glaring at the floor. I unfurled my hands and looked up at my friends.
"Yeah, I'm pissed. I'm pissed at Nate. Why couldn't he just do the plan like I asked him to? If he did, none of this would've happened! If he had just shown himself to us, we could all have escaped by now! But instead, we're having to go look for him. But frankly, I'm done. I don't care if he's here or not. I say, we break out now and leave him here. Who's with me?"
Everyone was silent. Not one person spoke, nudged or even looked at each other. They were all focused on me.
"I said, who's with me?" I repeated. This time, they looked between themselves before saying, "Sure, ok, let's go."
"Great. So let's turn around and go back to the entrance. We'll figure a way out from there."
We all started making our way back down the hallway towards the main entrance when something made us stop dead in our tracks. The sound of guards. The sound of dozens of guards. But there was another sound. Thumping. Like someone hitting the floor. Every time we heard a few footsteps getting louder, we heard a thump, also progressively getting louder. But suddenly, the sounds stopped. And running out into the main hallway from one off the side...was Nate.